Crash of the Titan: The long and winding saga of the Apple Car

If you were waiting for the Apple Car to get released before you bought another automobile, you don’t have to wait anymore.

Yes, as you’ve certainly already heard, Bloomberg reported last week that Apple has canceled its car project (known as Project Titan) and will be shifting some workers over to its efforts in AI.

This closes a long and storied chapter in The Big Book of Things We Have Argued About. Over the years, a lot of people said Apple would never be able to make a car; in effect, “The PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” This time, however, they were apparently right.

The Macalope was not. He saw no reason why Apple would not be able to make a car. But he was wrong, so he apologizes to those he laughed at over the last 10 years over this. Apple, it turns out, could not make a car.

At least it couldn’t make the kind of car it wanted to. The Macalope’s not going to try to win on a technicality by saying “Ah! They could have made a car, but they chose not to!” Because it’s on him for not realizing that an Apple car, obviously, wouldn’t have been just any car.

According to The New York Times’s overview of Project Titan, exactly what an Apple car was going to be changed a lot over the years (which was part of the project’s undoing). Roughly, though, it started as an electric car, then was to be a fully autonomously-driving Jony Ive-inspired egg lounge with probably a velour interior and a wet bar, then finally went back to being an electric car. Before being canceled.

Let’s start with the hard part. Why couldn’t Apple create a self-driving car? Because despite Elon Musk’s assurances every year for 10 years that fully autonomous driving was just six months away, fully autonomous driving (as a consumer-ready technology) is still not six months away. It’s probably not even six years away.

Yes, there are currently some self-driving cars working limited routes in certain areas. And even under those relatively controlled conditions, people are getting dragged down the street under them. This is not the kind of business Apple wants to be in.

Okay, so why not do just an electric car? How hard is that? This the Macalope still firmly believes Apple could have done this. It didn’t simply because it couldn’t make the kind of electric car it wanted to make. Sure, it would have CarPlay. Sure, it would look nice. Sure, Apple would take 30 percent of whatever business deals you cut in it. But other electric cars have CarPlay and look nice. The Macalope believes Apple simply couldn’t find enough ways to make its car stand out that would justify the amount that it would need to charge for the car in order for garner the margins it would want.

You think the Vision Pro is expensive, just imagine what an Apple Car would have cost. This is why the Apple Zeppelin never got off the drawing board.

It’s possible there is an upside to this, other than saving us a lot of money. As car makers are now less inclined to see Apple as a potential competitor, maybe some of them who have pushed CarPlay to the curb, will reconsider their stance. At least then we can still get some kind of Apple experience on the road.